Digital transformation is at the center of business strategies as organizations endeavor to capture the opportunities that enhance business and customer experience while improving operational efficiencies and organizational performance. As digital technologies pervade all aspects of business processes, products, and services, the impact on infrastructure and applications is challenging and pressuring the enterprise IT. Organizations in Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) are increasingly demanding IT infrastructure that is highly available, agile, reliable, and secure, and supports innovation and deployment of new technologies. Driven by these challenges faced by organizations, the following are the key observations from IDC's 2016 IT Services Survey:

Tech buyers are transforming their organization into digital enterprises, and datacenter transformation is emerging as a main focus area. To embark on the 3rd Platform-enabled digital transformation journey, a robust delivery platform is essential, and organizations are investing in highly virtualized, software-defined, converged, and cloud-centric datacenter environments.

The growing adoption of 3rd Platform technologies such as cloud services is fundamentally altering enterprises' IT sourcing strategies, shifting IT budgets from a capex to an opex operational model. With the growing cost of doing business in the region, enterprises are increasingly leveraging DX to improve productivity (so as to counter the rising cost of buying and owning IT infrastructure) and reduce their operational costs. 3rd Platform technologies are being used strategically to enter new markets as well as operationally to address short-term goals such as IT cost management.

Large investments are being made in digital platforms and automation, and organizations are signing flexible, short-term tactical services engagements with service providers to implement these new DX applications. Enterprise IT's new role is to enable innovation and improve IT service delivery via standardization and automation so that businesses can be more agile and scalable. This in turn is leading to the increase in demand for integration, automation, consultative, and strategic advisory services with focus on industry-specific solutions.

The digital transformation initiatives are radically changing the way enterprises engage and interact with their ecosystem of customers, partners, suppliers, and even competitors, blurring the boundaries between various stakeholders. Digital transformation broadens the scope, size, and impact of cyberattacks, and enterprises are scrambling to secure themselves in a rapidly evolving environment. Understandably, security enhancement features as a prominent theme for IT services spend across the region.